Flannery O'Connor Quotes
Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.
Flannery O'Connor
Quotes to Explore
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Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.
Flannery O'Connor
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I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
Flannery O'Connor
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If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.
Flannery O'Connor
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I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.
Flannery O'Connor
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I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil. I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.
Flannery O'Connor
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To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
Flannery O'Connor
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All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
Flannery O'Connor
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When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
Flannery O'Connor
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He knew something was going to happen and his entire system was waiting on it. He thought it was going to be one of the supreme moments in life but apart from that, he didn't have the vaguest notion what it might be. He pictured himself, after it was over, as an entirely new man, with an even better personality than he had now. He sat there for about fifteen minutes and nothing happened.
Flannery O'Connor
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It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.
Flannery O'Connor
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Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
Flannery O'Connor
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My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.
Flannery O'Connor